I have used them for some time in Europe.Very detailed and very non fatique sounding amplifier...midrange just step bellow tube amps, but the highs are very good. Are they worth $$? Yes, if you are shopping for the ultimate....and your speakers are up to the task!

Extremely well stabilised sound, particularly in the hi register (amps are wide-bandwidth). I've used some products (pre & phono) and listened to a full FM set-up (ie. bring yr own source, plug & play) which offered excellent sound: by this I mean, music for people -- not sound for oscilloscopes.

I suspect that channel balance is exemplary in the pre & phono equaliser (i.e. the circuit components are really matched in each component).Their preamplification & equaliser products seem slightly superior to the amplification products -- or, otherwise said, there are other amps out there which may be competitive (in performance, not price), but very few products out there to match the pre & phono.Price -- as per Prcinka above.

Phono - 122, line- 155/245; power - 411. Don't know about the MBL as I heard this at a different occasion. It was a nice component as well.

/What other SS amps are competitive in performance?

Quite a few, I would imagine. However none that I know offer the compactness: Dartzeel's amp is good, Symphonic Line's "Kraft" class A also competes very well (excellent with 155 driven by 122), as does a Boulder model I forget which, as well as the older Lamm (tube). There are others I don;t know.

However, if price is a factor, none of the contenders I mention are any cheaper...

The most important thing IMO is that the FM (and to a degree Dartzeel as well) offers "pre-optimised plug & play" solutions: that is, all the components & peripherals you need are available and perform extremely well. So, you just go to the shop, put whatever you need in yr shopping bag (amps, wires, equalisers...), go home, plug in and listen to music. No discussions re, damping factor, analyses on bass extension, "soundstages", curtains lifting or falling, room treating et alia, or voodoo tweaking...

You know, when you're spending that kind of money it's nice to have someone else worry about all these things:)

What is the secret of their good sound? Are the technical people at FM Acoustics and Boulder smarter than the people at Madrigal or Krell? Could Madrigal or Krell sound as good as FM Acoustics or Boulder even with "unlimited" financial resources?

fm stuff is incredible, but i would be more inclined to compare it sonically with goldmund, ensemble or revox then boulder. boulder sounds much closer to krell..and there's nothing wrong with that at all.

Gregm, of course I was joking. The fact is: many audiophiles (mostly in South East Asia), but also world famous artists like Yo Yo Ma and late Leonard ("Lenny")Bernstein think FM Acoustics power amps (and preamps as well) are much better than the offerings from Madrigal and Krell. So, I'm just curious what could be the reason for this: Better parts quality/matching? Better engineering? Designer's kharma? Voo doo magic? The almost insane price tags?

If you are talking about high bandwidth amplifier designs, two others are Essence and Spectral. My Essence Emerald II amp has a bandwidth of more than 5 MHz. The thing you have to be careful about in most of these designs is the amplification of RFI and EMI noise.